Contrasts are sharp in 'Clybourne Park'; 'Sovereign Statement' at Neo

Redtwist Theatre has made a cottage industry out of intimate productions of shows that first popped up locally at Steppenwolf, including Tracy Letts' "Man from Nebraska" and Martin McDonagh's "The Pillowman." But their latest offering — Bruce Norris' Pulitzer Prize-winning "Clybourne Park," which ran on Halsted Street two years ago — comes at a particularly propitious moment, given the concurrent run of TimeLine Theatre's stellar revival of "A Raisin in the Sun" about four miles south.

As you've probably heard, Norris' play takes its starting point from Lorraine Hansberry's classic about a 1950s black family in Chicago deciding to move into the all-white — and fictional — neighborhood of Clybourne Park. Two acts divided by 50 years provide a corrosive snapshot of how that warm-and-fuzzy term "community" often hides in plain sight the prejudices of those living there – mostly racial, but also biases against anyone who upsets the cozy fiction of shared values.

Director Steve Scott's stripped-down staging sets the audience all around the perimeter of the 1959 dining room of Russ (Brian Parry) and Bev (Jan Ellen Graves), who are preparing to move out of Clybourne Park. It is not until the arrival of Pat Whalen's Karl Lindner (the one character also present in Hansberry's play) that they learn the new homeowners are black — the Younger family from Hansberry's play, as it turns out. As Karl and the cloying minister, Jim, (Michael Sherwin) plead with Russ to reconsider the sale, the latter's pent-up rage at the shabby treatment he and his wife experienced after a tragedy pours forth, encompassing the black maid, Francine (Kelly Owens), her husband, Alfred (Frank Pete), and Karl's winsome pregnant deaf wife, Betsy (Carley Moseley).

The second act is weaker as Norris returns to the bag of linguistic confrontational tricks used in earlier works such as "The Pain and the Itch." Set in 2009, the story now involves Lena (Owens again), the grand-niece of Lena Younger, who is selling the home to a white couple, Steve and Lindsay (Whalen and Moseley), who want to tear it down and build a McMansion. (The underlying mechanics of gentrification got a far more nuanced treatment earlier this fall with Steven Simoncic's "Broken Fences" at Berwyn's 16th Street Theater.)

Where Steppenwolf's production showed clearly the physical decline in the house in those 50 years as a symbol of the decay brought on by white flight, here the home's condition is implied without being shown. The audience, already uncomfortably close to the escalating series of racially tinged jokes and gibes, also has to confront their own imagined notions of just what this property really looks like — and why they think this way.

It's a smart choice — one of many in Scott's swiftly paced production, which favors rat-a-tat overlapping dialogue that still allows some of the moments of genuine pain to come through. Norris' tendency to elide the more pernicious realities of race and class is still present, but the performances — particularly those of Parry, Graves, and Owens — stake a powerful claim.

Bilal Dardai's nifty exploration for the Neo-Futurists of "micronations" — created by those disgruntled contrarians who pick up where Aristophanes' "The Acharnians" left off and declare independence for their own homes or airspace — also deals with questions of tribalism and resentment. As Dardai, born in Pakistan but raised in the United States, confronts his own status as someone who is "from" one place but "of" another, he and the other five cast members take us through our own experiment in micronation-building — complete with national anthems, flags, and inevitable counter-revolutions.

Structured so that splinter groups of audience members are sent into different parts of the Neo-Futurarium during the 100-minute show, "The Sovereign Statement" utilizes the Neo-Futurist principle of randomness to great results. (I was pleased to be part of the "rat room," where plots to overthrow Phil Ridarelli's "Generalissimo the Just" took place.) In between, snippets of information about real micronations — from Pitcairn Island of "Mutiny on the Bounty" fame to Talossa, founded by 14-year-old Milwaukeean Robert Ben Madison in 1979 — provide frameworks for meditating on just what forces drive us to organize as families and nations.

"All nations are narratives," Dardai says. "Why do you think a piece of land is called a plot?" With an expert blending of theatrical gamesmanship and honest inquiry into how we define homelands, "The Sovereign Statement" provides a timely and pungent analysis of how states and citizens become disunited.